January 25, 2011 12:35 AM UTC

Not Jimmy Carter After All?

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Hill reports today, sure to provoke a lively debate:

President Obama hit his highest approval rating since fall of 2009, in a CNN/Opinion Research poll released Monday.

Fifty-five percent of Americans said they approve of the way Obama is handling his job, according to a poll conducted over the weekend, the first time he’s hit such a high number in that same poll since November of 2009…

The rebound comes as Obama has made a point of pivoting toward the center, and making more overtures toward Republicans in Congress. He’ll deliver his “State of the Union” address on Tuesday night, which could present an opportunity for him to cement his remade image before the public.

The thing is, most of the liberals we know never really thought Barack Obama had to “remake” a “centrist image” to begin with. They said so consistently, too, every time Obama made a compromise (or an attempt at one) that outraged the liberal base of the Democratic Party, or declared a favored Democratic policy goal unachievable. When you get right down to it, the caricature of ‘ultra-liberal Obama’ really only existed in the imaginations of his Republican adversaries, most of whom didn’t really believe it either. We’d say this thaw in Obama’s approval numbers has as much to do with hyperbole fatigue as anything else–after two years, Americans are finally realizing that Obama isn’t actually Hitler, Stalin, Castro, and Osama all rolled into one. Tom Tancredo’s Nazis-and-nuclear-war comparison is a perfect example of what we mean–the stuff just gets ridiculous after awhile, and people stop listening to you.